From Pillaging to Prosperity
Arthur Herman - The Viking Heart : How Scandinavians Conquered The World
National Review, October 4, 2021
Norway, March 2015 © Andrew Stuttaford
The Viking Heart, the latest work by the historian Arthur Herman, is engaging, informative, and highly readable. As Herman deals with four separate topics each of which deserves a book of its own, it is also an extremely ambitious undertaking. His reach may sometimes exceed his grasp, but even when that is the case the results are likely to leave readers wanting more — in a good way.
The first topic, taking up a third or so of The Viking Heart’s text, is a history of the “classic” Viking era. The second is a discussion of what happened next — the Vikings did not just vanish into nothingness when the longships ceased setting sail. The third touches on the Scandinavian experience in America. The fourth, which is more of a thread running through the book, is an examination of what Herman dubs “the Viking heart,” character traits (mercifully somewhat evolved since that heart began beating) that, in his view, contributed so much to the development of these northern peoples and the impact they have had far beyond the fjords, forests, and lakes of their homelands.
They might not have (in the words of The Viking Heart’s subtitle) literally “conquered” the world any more than — to borrow from the title of one of Herman’s earlier works — the Scots literally “invented” its modern iteration. Nevertheless, both claims contain too much truth to be ignored. The Vikings, or their descendants, continued to transform major portions of the world long after the pillaging had stopped. So the Normans expanded and fortified the boundaries of Christendom and acted as “living conduits” transmitting knowledge from other cultures into and across Europe, with consequences that changed a continent. Centuries later, it was a Swedish warrior-king — not quite the last of them — who did much to save the Reformation. Some while after that, Scandinavians started emigrating in their hundreds of thousands to the North America that Leif Erikson had visited nearly a millennium before.
There, as Herman demonstrates, they played an outsize part in molding the United States in which they made their home, whether in peace or in war, whether forgotten to history or with names — not just Lindbergh — that live on, or should: Among the statues torn down in the summer of 2020 was one erected outside the state capitol building in Madison, Wis., of the Norwegian-American Hans Christian Heg, a convinced abolitionist who raised a regiment to fight for the Union for which he was to give his life. It’s almost certainly too optimistic to hope that some of those who toppled that statue might read what Herman has to say about Heg and come to regret what they did.
Many of the people who buy The Viking Heart will be buying it for swords and slaughter. They won’t be disappointed. If accounts of longships appearing on the horizon, of the clash of arms, and of monasteries aflame appeal to you — and whom would they not appeal to? — then this book will fit the bill. On top of that, however, Herman brilliantly evokes Viking inventiveness (the longships, for instance, were the product of astonishingly innovative design), élan, and ambition.
The Vikings reached the New World, but they also manned an elite military unit for the Byzantine Empire, ancient Rome’s last, thousand-year gasp. They made it to Spain, they showed up in Baghdad. As they switched from raiders to colonizers — an evolution that Herman deftly traces — their realms (bear in mind that plural: cohesion was, as Herman also relates, never really a Viking thing) sprawled at one time or another across the North Sea, the North Atlantic, the Baltic, into the territory of the eastern Slavs (the Vikings’ critical role in establishing what became Russia remains one of their more dubious legacies), deep into modern France, across to Sicily, and into the Middle East. With the rise and fall of numerous kingdoms and kings (at least one of the more supposedly significant of whom, Harald Finehair, may not have existed), their tale could easily dissolve into an incomprehensible mess, a trap that Herman adroitly avoids.
Herman does not neglect the Vikings’ rich and, given their reputation, surprisingly sophisticated civilization. Naturally the Norse gods, a gang of killers and tricksters who make Olympus look like Walton’s Mountain, turn up, as does Ragnarök, the grandest of all humanity’s imagined apocalypses:
The sun turns black,
The earth sinks into the sea,
The bright stars
Fall out of the sky.
Climate change, eat your heart out.
The Viking relationship with the supernatural was perhaps even more involved than in Herman’s portrayal, but attempting to cover so much historical ground in one book comes at a price. That is not to imply that Herman, an author who finds the space to let us know that some Vikings, less homogeneous than generally understood, dyed their hair blonde, skimps on detail. On the contrary, he offers an excellent more-than-introduction to this subject that sheds a great deal of light on what the Vikings believed. He also provides some clues as to how they worshiped. They are not enticing. In the sacred grove around the temple complex at Uppsala, the carcasses and corpses of sacrificial victims, canine and equine as well as human, reportedly hung from the trees. It is fair to say that the arrival of Christianity (Uppsala has been the principal Swedish ecclesiastical center for over 800 years) represented an aesthetic as well as a moral improvement.
But, as Herman shows, aesthetics — in the shape of the pagan features that can be found in Norway’s famous stave churches — also reflect the reality that “the twilight of the gods in the Viking lands . . . [took] longer than originally forecast.” This, I suspect, might have owed something to a certain pragmatism — old and new beliefs coexisted for quite some time — as well as to the fact that the old sagas, not all of them devoted to the otherworldly, and filled with deeper meaning than all that bloodshed might suggest, still resonated even as the churches filled. Then they were largely forgotten, only to be rediscovered hundreds of years later. Their extraordinary power was such that they were ready not only to be revived but, as Herman notes, to be reimagined, all the way from Bayreuth to HBO: Winter had returned.
Herman is of partly Norwegian descent and his description of the Nordic ethos occasionally errs, however forgivably, on the generous side. That said, he pulls no punches when it comes to the cruelty that was interwoven in Viking society, a cruelty that extended far beyond that grim grove. He explains, for example, how the trade in slaves helped pay for the Vikings’ expansion. At the same time, “in a world where rape, pillage, and the murder of war captives or their sale into slavery were largely the norm, the Vikings do not stand out as particularly bloodthirsty or ruthless.” Ah, the old “everyone was doing it” defense. Then again, many were.
After all this, the rest of the book could easily have been something of an anticlimax, but Herman picks up the pace, and the centuries fly by. He is a magpie historian, swooping down on what interests him (and should interest readers), whether it is Margaret of Denmark, the queen who briefly unified the Scandinavian lands, or Gustavus Adolphus, that penultimate warrior king, or the remarkable contributions that so many of Scandinavian ancestry have made to the U.S.
But perhaps the most thought-provoking observation, in a book filled with many, is the importance Herman attaches to the fact that Lutheranism, rather than Calvinism and its kin, was the form of Protestantism that prevailed in Scandinavia. “In short,” writes Herman, “the primary goal of the Lutheran work ethic is not self-betterment . . . but the betterment of the community.” This is a different emphasis from that normally associated with the Protestant work ethic, which goes some way, along with the linked focus on the term used by the Norwegian-American sociologist Thorstein Veblen, “workmanship” — think of Swedish engineering — to explaining how Swedish prosperity survived penal taxation through much of the second half of the 20th century, until the bill finally fell due in the early 1990s. As Herman recounts, the country altered course then, as did its neighbors.
Herman rightly stresses the priority put on community in Nordic culture, something he regards a little too fondly. He doesn’t deal, at least directly, with how it can mutate into something oppressive (and worse) — and in the Nordic countries all too frequently has. Their peculiarly stifling version of Australia’s tall-poppy syndrome was enough of a phenomenon to be satirized in a well-known novel written nearly 90 years ago and is hard to reconcile with the more buccaneering qualities — the willingness to leap out into the unknown in pursuit of a dream — that Herman still sees in today’s Viking heart. Without explicitly addressing that contradiction, he notes how well the immigrants from the Nordic region to the U.S. have fared and how they have prospered when compared with the descendants of those that stayed back home. He also points to the fact that the free-market reforms introduced in the Nordic region over the last three decades have had some success. There is a lesson there, and not just for Vikings.